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Project Solar Sail
Based on Clarke's concept of solar sailing, this anthology of tales and essays features the work of such authors as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Poul Anderson
246 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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About the author
Arthur C. Clarke
1,661 books11.7k followersStories, works of noted British writer, scientist, and underwater explorer Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, include
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968).
This most important and influential figure in 20th century fiction spent the first half of his life in England and served in World War II as a radar operator before migrating to Ceylon in 1956. He co-created his best known novel and movie with the assistance of Stanley Kubrick.
Clarke, a graduate of King's College, London, obtained first class honours in physics and mathematics. He served as past chairman of the interplanetary society and as a member of the academy of astronautics, the royal astronomical society, and many other organizations.
He authored more than fifty books and won his numerous awards: the Kalinga prize of 1961, the American association for the advancement Westinghouse prize, the Bradford Washburn award, and the John W. Campbell award for his novel Rendezvous with Rama. Clarke also won the nebula award of the fiction of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979, the Hugo award of the world fiction convention in 1974 and 1980. In 1986, he stood as grand master of the fiction of America. The queen knighted him as the commander of the British Empire in 1989.
This most important and influential figure in 20th century fiction spent the first half of his life in England and served in World War II as a radar operator before migrating to Ceylon in 1956. He co-created his best known novel and movie with the assistance of Stanley Kubrick.
Clarke, a graduate of King's College, London, obtained first class honours in physics and mathematics. He served as past chairman of the interplanetary society and as a member of the academy of astronautics, the royal astronomical society, and many other organizations.
He authored more than fifty books and won his numerous awards: the Kalinga prize of 1961, the American association for the advancement Westinghouse prize, the Bradford Washburn award, and the John W. Campbell award for his novel Rendezvous with Rama. Clarke also won the nebula award of the fiction of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979, the Hugo award of the world fiction convention in 1974 and 1980. In 1986, he stood as grand master of the fiction of America. The queen knighted him as the commander of the British Empire in 1989.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 30, 2011
If Project Solar Sail had been conceived today, it would be a website complete with hip-styled bloggers from NASA and also the science fiction community. There would be Twitter updates whenever the slightest new development occurred. And all of this content would be religiously linked to Facebook for the benefit of people who think that high-end media should come to them for free. However, in 1990 it still made sense to generate grassroots support by printing and selling a pocket book collection of fiction, poetry and essays by leading scientific writers.
Nevertheless, though Project Solar Sail is literarily a blast from the past, its content is even more relevant today. In the last year both NASA and JAXA (Japan’s space agency) have successfully deployed solar sail technology in space. And the Planetary Society, of which yours truly is a member, is in the build phase for a solar sail that could launch within the next year. Solar sailing as a means to traverse outer space is becoming a reality. So I would love to see this book catch on again.
In literary terms, this is not a classic from cover to cover. Some of the contributions are ordinary. Others are outstanding reads. In particular, I loved these two richly detailed and heartfelt entries: “To Sail Beyond the Sun”, a meditative poem by Ray Bradbury and Jonathan V. Post; also “Goodnight, Children”, a delightful and heartwarming yuletide tale with a galactic twist by Joe Clifford Faust. If you love Christmas, you’ll love this story even if you aren’t into science fiction.
Included essays about the political and economic ramifications for solar sailing are informative and worthy of review. But with fresh material available at NASA’s NanoSail-D webpage and the above mentioned Planetary Society, this book is no longer the best starting point for educating yourself about solar sails. I still think it’s worthy of a reprint or e-book edition. Somebody with publishing clout and venture capital get on this.
For space enthusiasts, there is a lot in this book to get excited about. I highly recommend seeking it out through used book dealers. However, if you are just considering getting into the sci-fi genre, I wouldn’t start here. Try an established classic like Carl Sagan’s Contact or Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey . But then quickly get back to this book.
DISCLAIMER: This is not a full-length work by Arthur C. Clarke. He functioned as Editor and also as a headliner by contributing three pieces of his own.
Nevertheless, though Project Solar Sail is literarily a blast from the past, its content is even more relevant today. In the last year both NASA and JAXA (Japan’s space agency) have successfully deployed solar sail technology in space. And the Planetary Society, of which yours truly is a member, is in the build phase for a solar sail that could launch within the next year. Solar sailing as a means to traverse outer space is becoming a reality. So I would love to see this book catch on again.
In literary terms, this is not a classic from cover to cover. Some of the contributions are ordinary. Others are outstanding reads. In particular, I loved these two richly detailed and heartfelt entries: “To Sail Beyond the Sun”, a meditative poem by Ray Bradbury and Jonathan V. Post; also “Goodnight, Children”, a delightful and heartwarming yuletide tale with a galactic twist by Joe Clifford Faust. If you love Christmas, you’ll love this story even if you aren’t into science fiction.
Included essays about the political and economic ramifications for solar sailing are informative and worthy of review. But with fresh material available at NASA’s NanoSail-D webpage and the above mentioned Planetary Society, this book is no longer the best starting point for educating yourself about solar sails. I still think it’s worthy of a reprint or e-book edition. Somebody with publishing clout and venture capital get on this.
For space enthusiasts, there is a lot in this book to get excited about. I highly recommend seeking it out through used book dealers. However, if you are just considering getting into the sci-fi genre, I wouldn’t start here. Try an established classic like Carl Sagan’s Contact or Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey . But then quickly get back to this book.
DISCLAIMER: This is not a full-length work by Arthur C. Clarke. He functioned as Editor and also as a headliner by contributing three pieces of his own.
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February 23, 2026This review was originally published, with additional citations, on Off The Shelf.
I love perusing secondhand bookstores. I love finding little historical artifacts of the previous epochs of literary history; and so it was that I stumbled across 1990’s Project Solar Sail at one of the local shops here in Chicago. At the time of its discovery, I was acquianted enough with the works of Arthur C. Clarke that I grabbed it off the shelf on the basis of his name alone; and then I saw the other names on the cover and my curiosity was doubly, triple-y, quadruply piqued. A collection of sci-fi short stories edited by Arthur C. Clarke? Sign me up. I couldn’t wait to see what was inside.
A week or two later, I sat down to actually read the thing, and I was surprised by what I found. Though the cover explains exactly what it is that this book is about (“…the next step in interstellar exploration—lightships and solar sails”) I was surprised to discover that it was not just short stories in the pages of this book, but poetry (including a reprinting of Alfred, Lord Tennyson of all people—an unexpected surprise in this book about solar sails, given the fact that Tennyson died nearly a hundred years before this book was published) and academic essays from real astrophysicists and even some JPL folks, laying out the real-world explanations for the stories composed by the novelists.
Do other works like this exist? Collections of stories to popularize complicated new technologies amongst the laypeople? I certainly can’t think of any, but they must. They are the platonic ideal of Judith Merrill’s science-fiction “teaching story” (one designed to “popularize new scientific advancements”), and I think it’s an exceedingly novel idea, the collaboration between science and storytelling in a more tangible and literal sense. I feel like there’s a ton of opportunity for more works like this, but I understand why it hasn’t happened in this current era. Reusable rockets doesn't feel like a great prompt for short stories. Rocket go up, it go down, it go up again. Maybe something about space telescopes? Kip Thorne released a whole The Science of Interstellar to explain the scientific concepts laid out in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar—why not enlist other authors to make a book of short stories about those concepts? There’s a market for this… somewhere. I’m not tuned in to the science world enough to be the guy to spearhead it, but I’m more than happy to contribute if someone where to approach me!
But now we’re off track. Back to Project Solar Sail.
As far as the stories themselves go, there’s also a lot here to love. My favorites were David Brin’s “Ice Pilot” (both for story and its fun playing with format), Poul Anderson’s “Sunjammer”, Charles Sheffield’s “Grand Tour” (about an inter-system Tour de France-style race on ion-propelled bikes), and Joe Faust’s “Goodnight, Children” (about Christmas on Mars. How does Santa get there?), though Clarke’s “The Wind From the Sun” is probably the standout.
The scientific essays are great, but dry—though I would never suggest reprinting this collection without them. That would defeat the whole purpose! And the fact that they’re there is basically half the charm of this thing—wonderful, sprawling fiction, and then these nerds (complimentary) getting in there to explain the nitty gritty of the real world concepts. It’s even got a whole spread in the middle of photographs and charts to help cement the ideas.
But it’s not a perfect collection by any stretch. I found the stories by Kevin Anderson, Doug Beason, and Larry Niven to be the biggest letdowns, one much more so than the other. Anderson and Beason co-wrote “Rescue at L-5”, which involves the intriguing story element of bio-engineered solar sails, but for whatever reason didn’t particularly click with me. Niven’s story on the other hand, barely has anything to do with solar sails at all, they’re merely a minor background element. Now, I wouldn’t have a huge issue with that if it weren’t that Niven’s story is far and away the longest of the whole collection—spanning 56 of the book’s precious 246 pages. That’s way too big a chunk of this book to not be a prominently solar sail-oriented story. And to make matters worse, I doubly disliked Niven’s story for the way in which it handles its one prominent female character, who seems to exist only—as Le Guin wrote of Niven’s work in 1975—“to say Oh? and Ooooh! to the clever and resourceful hero”. I don’t know anything about Larry Niven outside of this story and the offhand remark Le Guin makes of him in The Language of the Night. Maybe he’s a cool dude, but his story—“The Fourth Profession”—really rubbed me the wrong way.
The final page of the book is an appeal for donations to the World Space Foundation, where for $100 dollars you can get your name printed on microfiche that will be carried aboard the first World Space Foundation solar sail spacecraft when it launches. For $50 you can get a t-shirt! I desperately want to see would happen if I sent anything to the address listed at the bottom of the appeal. Will I get a t shirt? The design looks cool! A website exists for the World Space Foundation, but it is clearly old and very broken. I don’t know if it’s even the same World Space Foundation that sponsored this book, as David Brin and Stephen W. Potts seems to have promoted the new edition of the book through Carl Sagan, Louis Friedman, and Bruce Murray’s The Planetary Society (Friedman co-authored the final essay of the first edition, and was executive director of The Planetary Society at the time of its publication).
As mentioned, there is a more contemporary version of this book, published in 2024: Project Solar Sail: 21st Century Edition, which adds David Brin and Stephen W. Potts to the editorial cohort (Clarke passed away in 2008); but I don’t know what, if anything, is all that different about it, aside from maybe the potential for some updated essays on the science. It’s 2026, and solar sails—as they’re presented in these stories—are still an oddly distant dream of space explorers. The microfiche of names held by the World Space Foundation is sitting in storage somewhere, its voyage to the stars stalled by technological hurdles, and likely a not too small number of budget and funding cuts. Space travel is, even now, as reusable rockets are coming into vogue, still an immensely expensive proposition, the realm of governments or the super wealthy. It was in the 50s when Bradbury mused: “It’s the rich who have dreams and rockets!” And it still was in the 90s when Clarke wrote—in the Afterword of Project Solar Sail—that it was “so hard for the average citizen to feel he or she is a participant [in space exploration].” And so it continues to be today, the realm of the Musks and the Bezos and the Bransons—and the massive governments and international ventures that subsidize them. Project Solar Sail’s final call to action is an effort to spread that feeling of participation, to give us little people a chance to pave the road to the stars. “That is what this volume has been all about,” Clarke writes. “It is the reason so many of us gave our time and creativity, in order to give a little boost to an idea.”
If you want to learn more about the more exotic, but still tangible methods of space travel, get yourself a copy of Project Solar Sail. And someone figure out if I can still get that t-shirt!
I love perusing secondhand bookstores. I love finding little historical artifacts of the previous epochs of literary history; and so it was that I stumbled across 1990’s Project Solar Sail at one of the local shops here in Chicago. At the time of its discovery, I was acquianted enough with the works of Arthur C. Clarke that I grabbed it off the shelf on the basis of his name alone; and then I saw the other names on the cover and my curiosity was doubly, triple-y, quadruply piqued. A collection of sci-fi short stories edited by Arthur C. Clarke? Sign me up. I couldn’t wait to see what was inside.
A week or two later, I sat down to actually read the thing, and I was surprised by what I found. Though the cover explains exactly what it is that this book is about (“…the next step in interstellar exploration—lightships and solar sails”) I was surprised to discover that it was not just short stories in the pages of this book, but poetry (including a reprinting of Alfred, Lord Tennyson of all people—an unexpected surprise in this book about solar sails, given the fact that Tennyson died nearly a hundred years before this book was published) and academic essays from real astrophysicists and even some JPL folks, laying out the real-world explanations for the stories composed by the novelists.
Do other works like this exist? Collections of stories to popularize complicated new technologies amongst the laypeople? I certainly can’t think of any, but they must. They are the platonic ideal of Judith Merrill’s science-fiction “teaching story” (one designed to “popularize new scientific advancements”), and I think it’s an exceedingly novel idea, the collaboration between science and storytelling in a more tangible and literal sense. I feel like there’s a ton of opportunity for more works like this, but I understand why it hasn’t happened in this current era. Reusable rockets doesn't feel like a great prompt for short stories. Rocket go up, it go down, it go up again. Maybe something about space telescopes? Kip Thorne released a whole The Science of Interstellar to explain the scientific concepts laid out in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar—why not enlist other authors to make a book of short stories about those concepts? There’s a market for this… somewhere. I’m not tuned in to the science world enough to be the guy to spearhead it, but I’m more than happy to contribute if someone where to approach me!
But now we’re off track. Back to Project Solar Sail.
As far as the stories themselves go, there’s also a lot here to love. My favorites were David Brin’s “Ice Pilot” (both for story and its fun playing with format), Poul Anderson’s “Sunjammer”, Charles Sheffield’s “Grand Tour” (about an inter-system Tour de France-style race on ion-propelled bikes), and Joe Faust’s “Goodnight, Children” (about Christmas on Mars. How does Santa get there?), though Clarke’s “The Wind From the Sun” is probably the standout.
The scientific essays are great, but dry—though I would never suggest reprinting this collection without them. That would defeat the whole purpose! And the fact that they’re there is basically half the charm of this thing—wonderful, sprawling fiction, and then these nerds (complimentary) getting in there to explain the nitty gritty of the real world concepts. It’s even got a whole spread in the middle of photographs and charts to help cement the ideas.
But it’s not a perfect collection by any stretch. I found the stories by Kevin Anderson, Doug Beason, and Larry Niven to be the biggest letdowns, one much more so than the other. Anderson and Beason co-wrote “Rescue at L-5”, which involves the intriguing story element of bio-engineered solar sails, but for whatever reason didn’t particularly click with me. Niven’s story on the other hand, barely has anything to do with solar sails at all, they’re merely a minor background element. Now, I wouldn’t have a huge issue with that if it weren’t that Niven’s story is far and away the longest of the whole collection—spanning 56 of the book’s precious 246 pages. That’s way too big a chunk of this book to not be a prominently solar sail-oriented story. And to make matters worse, I doubly disliked Niven’s story for the way in which it handles its one prominent female character, who seems to exist only—as Le Guin wrote of Niven’s work in 1975—“to say Oh? and Ooooh! to the clever and resourceful hero”. I don’t know anything about Larry Niven outside of this story and the offhand remark Le Guin makes of him in The Language of the Night. Maybe he’s a cool dude, but his story—“The Fourth Profession”—really rubbed me the wrong way.
The final page of the book is an appeal for donations to the World Space Foundation, where for $100 dollars you can get your name printed on microfiche that will be carried aboard the first World Space Foundation solar sail spacecraft when it launches. For $50 you can get a t-shirt! I desperately want to see would happen if I sent anything to the address listed at the bottom of the appeal. Will I get a t shirt? The design looks cool! A website exists for the World Space Foundation, but it is clearly old and very broken. I don’t know if it’s even the same World Space Foundation that sponsored this book, as David Brin and Stephen W. Potts seems to have promoted the new edition of the book through Carl Sagan, Louis Friedman, and Bruce Murray’s The Planetary Society (Friedman co-authored the final essay of the first edition, and was executive director of The Planetary Society at the time of its publication).
As mentioned, there is a more contemporary version of this book, published in 2024: Project Solar Sail: 21st Century Edition, which adds David Brin and Stephen W. Potts to the editorial cohort (Clarke passed away in 2008); but I don’t know what, if anything, is all that different about it, aside from maybe the potential for some updated essays on the science. It’s 2026, and solar sails—as they’re presented in these stories—are still an oddly distant dream of space explorers. The microfiche of names held by the World Space Foundation is sitting in storage somewhere, its voyage to the stars stalled by technological hurdles, and likely a not too small number of budget and funding cuts. Space travel is, even now, as reusable rockets are coming into vogue, still an immensely expensive proposition, the realm of governments or the super wealthy. It was in the 50s when Bradbury mused: “It’s the rich who have dreams and rockets!” And it still was in the 90s when Clarke wrote—in the Afterword of Project Solar Sail—that it was “so hard for the average citizen to feel he or she is a participant [in space exploration].” And so it continues to be today, the realm of the Musks and the Bezos and the Bransons—and the massive governments and international ventures that subsidize them. Project Solar Sail’s final call to action is an effort to spread that feeling of participation, to give us little people a chance to pave the road to the stars. “That is what this volume has been all about,” Clarke writes. “It is the reason so many of us gave our time and creativity, in order to give a little boost to an idea.”
If you want to learn more about the more exotic, but still tangible methods of space travel, get yourself a copy of Project Solar Sail. And someone figure out if I can still get that t-shirt!
February 28, 2009
A fine example of the pure mastery that was Arthur C Clarke. He left his mark on liturate with everyone of his stories and his spirit lives on through his life's work. Stimulating both scientists and dreamers he has had and will always have a profound impact on the way we view the universe around (and under) us.
December 14, 2019
Disque F para Frankenstein
No conto de Clarke, a história inicia-se algumas horas depois de se completar com êxito um novo sistema de satélites por triangulação, o qual permite, pela primeira vez, a cobertura planetária das comunicações telefônicas em tempo real.
"À 1h50, hora do meridiano de Greenwich, no dia 1 o de dezembro de 1975, todos os telefones do mundo começaram a tocar. Duzentos e cinquenta milhões de pessoas tiraram o fone do gancho para passar por alguns segundos de irritação ou perplexidade. (CLARKE, 1972, p. 127)
A trama prossegue para as primeiras falhas no sistema de telefonia. Cruzamentos bizarros de linhas e aviões voando de forma caótica, contas bancárias com saldos altíssimos, fornecimentos de água ou luz bloqueados, todos sintomas que levam diretamente para a conclusão mais lógica que o número de conexões telefônicas ultrapassou o de neurônios do cérebro humano e, assim, ganhou uma consciência, e seu primeiro berro foi o chamado em todos os terminais telefônicos, e agora, brinca travessa com as tecnologias humanas. As desgraças se sucedem, enquanto a Inteligência Artificial vai restringindo o acesso pelo controle da missão, até o ponto de bloquear totalmente o controle terrestre dos satélites, forjando assim um ser virtual, eternamente alimentado pelas baterias solares, e controlando as comunicações em todo o planeta. No final, o cientista principal do projeto parece não ter mais dúvidas:
"Williams se levantou devagar.
— Vamos voltar para o laboratório – sugeriu. – Deve haver alguma resposta por aí.
Sabia, porém, que era tarde, tarde demais. Para o Homo Sapiens, a campainha do telefone tinha dado o derradeiro sinal." (CLARKE, 1972, p. 140)
No conto de Clarke, a história inicia-se algumas horas depois de se completar com êxito um novo sistema de satélites por triangulação, o qual permite, pela primeira vez, a cobertura planetária das comunicações telefônicas em tempo real.
"À 1h50, hora do meridiano de Greenwich, no dia 1 o de dezembro de 1975, todos os telefones do mundo começaram a tocar. Duzentos e cinquenta milhões de pessoas tiraram o fone do gancho para passar por alguns segundos de irritação ou perplexidade. (CLARKE, 1972, p. 127)
A trama prossegue para as primeiras falhas no sistema de telefonia. Cruzamentos bizarros de linhas e aviões voando de forma caótica, contas bancárias com saldos altíssimos, fornecimentos de água ou luz bloqueados, todos sintomas que levam diretamente para a conclusão mais lógica que o número de conexões telefônicas ultrapassou o de neurônios do cérebro humano e, assim, ganhou uma consciência, e seu primeiro berro foi o chamado em todos os terminais telefônicos, e agora, brinca travessa com as tecnologias humanas. As desgraças se sucedem, enquanto a Inteligência Artificial vai restringindo o acesso pelo controle da missão, até o ponto de bloquear totalmente o controle terrestre dos satélites, forjando assim um ser virtual, eternamente alimentado pelas baterias solares, e controlando as comunicações em todo o planeta. No final, o cientista principal do projeto parece não ter mais dúvidas:
"Williams se levantou devagar.
— Vamos voltar para o laboratório – sugeriu. – Deve haver alguma resposta por aí.
Sabia, porém, que era tarde, tarde demais. Para o Homo Sapiens, a campainha do telefone tinha dado o derradeiro sinal." (CLARKE, 1972, p. 140)
December 24, 2024
This is The Planetary Society December Book Club selection. They will hold a podcast review on January 7, 2025. The classic Sci-Fi stories highlight the science behind solar sailing. Definitely a great read.
May 2, 2016
This is a collection of short stories, poems, and essays (non-fiction) focusing on solar-sail technology for space travel, edited by Arthur C. Clarke. Though published in 1990, these stories and essays are especially timely (or at least my reading of them was timely) given recent solar sail technology developments and tests carried out by the Planetary Society, along with Yuri Milner's recent announcement of proposals and plans to send a fleet of small robot spacecraft to Alpha Centauri using sails propelled by lasers.
December 5, 2016
Several good short stories and some interesting, though somewhat dated, non-fiction material about solar sails.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews